


Nebula.

by redundant



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Canon Compliant, Existential Angst, Freeform, Gen, The power of friendship, you know. fun things like that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-27
Updated: 2019-04-27
Packaged: 2020-02-07 10:50:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18619141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redundant/pseuds/redundant
Summary: It is not silence, of course, but what other word is there? There is the ship. There is the soft, low buzz of her own circuitry, as much part of her as her own beating heart, which she hears now, too. There is her breath, which disturbs the air. There are her atoms, tiny particles hurling themselves in furious circles around so much nothing. Movement is noise. There is no silence until you are dead, and even then, there is your body: it is still matter, and matter is energy. Even when we return to the dust, things still move. Nebula: just so much stardust, watching everything return to what it was and what it will be....pretty much exactly what it says on the tin. (yes it does get less angsty)





	Nebula.

The ship hums around her.

It is a familiar sound, of course. But it is different. There have always been footsteps pounding the metal, or the whine and drill of repairs, or if there was silence- and there is none, in space, unless you’re thirty seconds from dying in a vacuum- it was the terse kind between sisters forced to share a room or a cockpit. The kind you could chew on and sharpen your teeth.

This is not the same silence.

It is not silence, of course, but what other word is there? There is the ship. There is the soft, low buzz of her own circuitry, as much part of her as her own beating heart, which she hears now, too. There is her breath, which disturbs the air. There are her atoms, tiny particles hurling themselves in furious circles around so much nothing. Movement is noise. There is no silence until you are dead, and even then, there is your body: it is still matter, and matter is energy. Even when we return to the dust, things still move. Nebula: just so much stardust, watching everything return to what it was and what it will be.

She knows all of this.

And yet.

*

It hurts.

The fury, the guilt, the loss. All of it.

She was tortured longer than memory, and this hurts more.

*

She waits in a dead and empty ship and watches the stars. Nebula watching galaxies: the universe watching itself. Waiting for everything to return. A pendulum swinging backwards and forwards; stillness and movement and stillness again.

*

Nebula is alone.

But _he_ is in space, and she is not alone.

*

It is strange, not being alone.

Suddenly, with this man on the _Benatar_ , priorities shift: there is no time for sitting around, but instead things to do. Things to fix. Showers to take. Meals to eat.

It gets annoying fairly quickly.

Living with other people does that. It annoys her. She’s used to wanting to strangle something, all the time, always but not because it _talks_ so much. Even the raccoon was better than this.

They are at the table, again, after another meal eaten out of a packet. Nebula doesn’t care so much, but Stark seems to care enough for both of them, saying, “You know what I miss? I miss stuff that doesn’t taste like cardboard. I’d kill for a steak right now.”

She has no idea what cardboard is, but the sentiment transcends species. Humans. Never content.

That discontent leads to other things. He paces around a lot. He mutters. He rounds on her, once, and says, “You ever play Tic Tac Toe?”

Nebula looks up from a particularly frustrating patch of circuitry at his face- dead serious. She pushes past him to the room’s maintenance console; oxygen levels are at a normal. This does not explain his jargon. It is probably best to ignore him.

Without a word, she goes back to the circuitry.

So she turns, and now his face is frowning and his arms are crossed, and he says, “This is- this is ridiculous. You can _talk_. You know that? Talking? Does that compute?”

Nebula remains silent.

He shakes his head. “Jesus Christ. Seriously. Ask a question sometime. Have a conversation. It’s probably good for you, or something.”

Silence again. This is the familiar kind, the one thick enough to chew and swallow so words don’t come out and she doesn’t-

So she doesn’t-

It is heavy. It is a familiar, crushing weight.

But she is made of stronger stuff, made of muscle and metal and a low, burning anger; she is a machine, a sword honed till singing perfection, a sledgehammer blunt and crude. She has opened before. She’ll do it again.

The weight lifts. And the ship is still singing quietly around them.

“I don’t usually have-” the words are hard but she spits them out- “conversations with people.” He isn’t looking at her. “This isn’t easy for me.”

“No shit.”

“I want to try.”

Stark pauses over the circuit board, says, “Screw it,” and lifts his head. He sighs. “You ever have those moments where you think, this is _so_ weird?”

Nebula doesn’t smile, exactly, but her mouth twitches.

*

Later:

“So there’s a grid.”

“Yes.”

“And two types of pieces.”

“Yes.”

“And the point of this game…”

“Three in a row. Got it?”

“Yeah.”

(A clatter.)

“Interesting choice.”

(Silence for a while, punctuated by metal on metal.)

“You- oh. Okay.”

“Three in a row, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Like that?”

“Yeah. Exactly like that.”

*

When they are done with Tic Tac Toe, they move on to Chopsticks. And then Hangman. (That one doesn’t last: the universal translator on board gives up on them fairly quickly. Nebula doesn’t blame it.) And then, much more interestingly, something Stark calls Modified Foosball.

Nebula is used to handling shiny sharp things. Just not like this.

“Hold it,” Stark instructs her from across the table, “just like that. Yeah. And then-” his tongue is between his teeth, he’s frowning slightly- “you do,” and his brow furrows, and his fingers twitch, “ _that_.” The scrap metal soars in a neat arc over her index fingers, and lands with a small clatter.

“That,” says Nebula.

“That,” says Stark, and smiles.

*

Repairs are difficult. Their oxygen is shot to hell (Stark’s words) and sometimes they switch it off, just to save it. Just to put off the dust a little longer.

Nebula thinks, privately, that this is pointless. That they are delaying the inevitable in minute-long increments. And they might well be, but, as she finds out when she makes this private opinion public, Stark doesn’t give a fuck, and will personally fight her robot ass (Stark’s words), sans suit, if required, in order to get them back home.

“Okay,” says Nebula, and goes back to thinking her private thoughts.

Even more privately, though, she looks at him as he’s hunkered over whatever battery or circuit board they’ve got to fix. At the flickering light on the planes of his face, the crags, the furrows, shadow and lines. He isn’t old by human standards, but he could be someday. He has a woman back home, who he talks to in his helmet sometimes, when he thinks she’s asleep or on the far side of the ship. He wants to have a child with her.

She doesn’t understand, but allows it.

(Or she does understand more than she’d like to admit, and she- stars above- _wants_ him to go back and have a life.)

So she switches the oxygen off.

When this happens, Stark tends to go a little- weird. Loopy. She’s never smoked or snorted or drank anything, just seen her targets do it (they’re always easier to deal with inebriated); as she studies him, she notes that the effects are largely similar. He talks even more nonsensically than usual. He smiles more. He has very straight, white teeth.

“Not to be, uh, racist or anything, but you’re blue,” Stark says dreamily, one time, and giggles.

“What’s racist?” Nebula asks, muffled by an oxygen mask.

*

The ship isn’t humming like it used to.

Stark measures time out in shifts, in handfuls of stolen sleep.

Nebula doesn’t sleep if she can help it, and so measures time as they drift through it in a dying ship. She watches random stars through the windows. When they cut the oxygen she thinks of heat death and everything returning to itself. The universe was born in an explosion. Maybe its end will be the opposite: everything collapsing in on itself, stars leaving trails like loose wires as they are all sucked into the same point, and then- nothing. Not even dust.

*

In the meantime, they play games.

Stark teaches her more. Something called Hopscotch, which she finds pointless. Something called I Spy, which is somehow even more pointless. She likes Foosball the most. It’s not strategy, or pointless; it takes skill. She likes skill. She likes things you can learn by trial, things you can get good at.

Stark flicks the triangle easily over her fingers. “Point,” he says, and makes his hands a goal again.

Nebula takes it, positions it carefully, draws back her flesh index finger, the flat of her nail pressed into the pad of her thumb.

She closes her eyes, breathes in. Potential energy.

And then her finger flies, kinetic, and sends the scrap in a spiral past Stark’s widening eyes and over Stark’s goal, landing in his lap.

“Point,” Nebula says.

This goes on for some time. Sometimes Stark wins. Sometimes she does. The latter occurs more than the former, and as her points grow so does a simmering resentment on Stark’s face, and a quiet satisfaction that settles easy in the bits of Nebula that aren’t powered by lithium.

“This isn’t fair,” says Stark, and pushes the scrap back at her. “You have a robot arm.”

Which, it should be noted, she isn’t using. “You have a robot heart,” says Nebula.

“That’s true.”

“I know it is.” She flicks it again: point. “I also know I’m better than you at this.”

“You’re a barrel of laughs, you know that?”

Nebula tries to process this, and then says, “Thank you.”

Stark huffs out something that might be a laugh and says, “Jesus,” quietly and to himself, but he’s smiling when she catches him a few seconds later.

Point.

*

“Oh my God.”

Nebula looks around sharply. “What?”

“Walkman,” Stark says, “Walkman Walkman Walkman, oh my _God_.”

They find a tape that Quill left. Stark bitches about it but even she can tell he’s happy. There’s a song, a pretty one, that she pretends not to like: _Here Comes The Sun_. Not that she’s ever lived on a planet, but it’s a nice idea, waiting for the sun.

*

“I’m using your ship,” Stark says abruptly one day.

Nebula blinks. “What for?”

“Helmet,” he says.

There’s a tightness to his jaw that means that this is final.

“Don’t mess with the power cells,” is all she says.

*

They move around each other easily now. They have a rhythm, a routine. They’re working on repairs again and Stark is talking and she’s mainly not listening, because it’s something about cyborgs and how he doesn’t like them, when he pauses and says, “And if you’d hand me the-”

Nebula taps him on the shoulder with the torch he wants.

Stark looks up at her for a moment. The ship hums happily around them, for once. “That’s the one,” he says, and takes it, and looks back down. And then his head goes back up again. “You- thank you.”

Nebula shifts her weight to her back foot and folds her arms. 

The position is cocky, aggressive, an assertion of power. But her arms are folded tight around herself, too, around the sudden emptiness she feels between her lithium battery and stomach.

“You’re welcome,” she says.

Silence is a strange, transmutable thing: it shifts like mercury, it slides down her throat and into her eyes and fills her head with gauze-like memory. Hands working next to hers. Hearing voices laughing in other rooms. The ship has stopped humming again.

“You remind me of him,” Nebula says suddenly.

Stark doesn’t look up. “Who?”

“Rocket.”

There’s a pause, and then the welding torch sputters to a halt. It clunks as he puts it down on the ground. “The raccoon,” Stark says dubiously.

“That’s the one.”

He shifts to face her, scowling exactly the same way as Rocket. Something fills her then. A liquid hurt worse than the silence, because this one threatens to leak out of her eyes. “I don’t see it,” Stark says.

“You wouldn’t,” she says, and leaves.

*

Nebula sits alone in the cockpit. It’s easier this way.

She waits.

She breathes.

The universe watches itself drift outside the window.

*

When the universe is done watching, and has wiped all the warm, stupid tears from its one organic eye, it goes back to the engine, walking a little louder than usual so Stark will hear as she approaches.

He turns on cue. He looks old, and weary.

“Could use your help,” is all he says.

*

They are back at the engine.

Stark’s sitting back on his heels: Nebula is kneeling. Music is playing. Quill’s Earth songs. The pretty sounds give way to silence, eventually, which gives way to Stark’s words:

“We’re fucked.”

*

Forty-eight hours of oxygen. Probably less.

Stark is done with his helmet that night.

He records a message for Pepper and for Earth, the planet from which they are slowly moving further and further away. Things move slower now. Time is stretched out.

Stark sleeps.

Nebula finds him and holds his still-warm wrists; she hesitates, and then drags him into the pilot’s chair.

He will not die lying down.

She will, though.

It’s easier this way. The universe will return to itself.

And maybe she’ll see her again: the sister she lost and found and lost again, and maybe this will be easy, maybe the darkness will take her and return her back to so much dust.

*

Nebula closes her eyes.

It is cold.

*

It is warmer.

*

Nebula opens her eyes.

They are no longer drifting. They’ve stopped moving, which is-

“Impossible,” she mutters, and pushes herself up and around, and she’s striding down the corridor to the cockpit, knives in hand, and then-

Stark sits transfixed in the pilot’s seat. There is light pouring through the window: so much of it, so bright, that Nebula shields her eyes and yells, “What the fuck is going on?” It is like the light of a neutron star, great and terrible and beautiful; it flows like water and mercury; it ribbons around them.

“We’re saved,” Stark gasps. “We- holy _shit_ ,” and he’s getting up and she can see his silhouette getting closer and closer till his arms are around her. “Nebula, we’re going back.”

“What?” she whispers.

“Home,” he says. “A second chance.”

“How?” she asks.

“Don’t ask.” He’s crying, and wipes his face. “God, don’t ask.”

“A second chance,” she repeats, and doesn’t understand.

*

Later.

Much later.

She shoots herself dead in the chest, and her sister is next to her, and she watches an impossible body- her own, _her own_ \- become so much matter on the floor. She watches her father die, and become so much dust.

 _Good_ , she thinks with a vicious relief.

But there are things trickier and stranger than death. Harder to witness, too. Change. Evolution. All of this life growing towards the light.

She could get used to this.

**Author's Note:**

> i had a lot of feelings about nebula, okay?  
> this was written/posted a) hastily and b) without a beta, so if you catch any typos/other errors, lmk.  
> kudos and comments give me life! if you, too, have feelings about the best danger robot ex-assassin in the galaxy, don't hesitate to express in the form of keyboard smashes or exclamation marks  
> find me on tumblr [here](https://transitory-yes.tumblr.com)


End file.
